Much has been said of Britney Spears’s Instagram feed, because, in part, it achieves real authenticity—a social media manager’s forever white whale—in a world of promotional sharing. Unlike many celebrities, the pop star appears to be the one posting photos, some of which include her own memes and her own inspirational quotes. She tosses them up, rarely bothering with a filter it or laboring over the crop. It’s exactly what any good celebrity Instagram should be: an anodyne scroll best perused 10 minutes before bedtime or after a politician tweets about a contentious U.S. executive order. It brings the heart rate down.

Occasionally, though, she interrupts the calm feed with creepy antique pictures of children. Sometimes they are posted with captions, but usually they’re presentedwithout comment. Sometimes they’re accompanied by a frog:

Arguably the creepiest photo—or at least the one most likely to decorate a successful haunted house flyer—appeared around Halloween. It’s of a mustachioed man accompanied by two young children—all with matching tuxedos and hair parted down the middle. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly makes it so frightening, but there’s something about the ratio of the man's size to that of the children, their shared seriousness, and small people wearing adult people clothes that truly terrifies. It would fit better on the Cursed Image Twitter account than it does on our culture’s purest form of former teen pop star's.

Again, Spears offered no explanation in the caption or otherwise, though one would assume it was related to All Hallows Eve.

Why she so earnestly loves these petite terrors is almost certainly unknowable, possibly even to Spears herself. (Vanity Fair has reached out to Spears’s representative for answers.) Maybe they’re little nods to a secret kitschy edge outside her princess of bubble-gum pop brand. Maybe it’s nostalgia for a bygone era when kids were frequent character actors for Kodak Brownies. Most likely she just likes them, and maybe she should just have that.

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